10 Best Quotes From "Outliers: The Story Of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”

“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”

“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”

“It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfils us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”

“...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”

“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

“Achievement is talent plus preparation”

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

“I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”